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University of Southern Maine
Libraries & Learning

SPM 100: Introduction to Health, Exercise, and Sport Sciences

This course orients the student to the expectations of a baccalaureate education in athletic training, exercise science, or health sciences

Databases

Finding Articles

Keywords
When researching a topic, brainstorm words that will help you find articles. As you search for articles, you may change words and make adjustments to the search. When you find a useful article, check for the keywords that the author has listed and try searching these terms.

knee, knee injuries, ACL, skiing injuries,

Narrow or Broaden Search
As you search for articles, you may need to use "Boolean Operators" which means using the words AND OR NOT to include or exclude certain research topics.

ACL AND injury
nutrition OR diet AND athlete
strength AND athlete NOT wrestling

Quotation Marks
Use quotes when you want two or more words to be in an exact phrase.

In SPORTSDiscus, a search using
injury AND prevention AND basketball
will yield many more articles than a search using
"injury prevention" AND basketball
But, if your research focus is "injury prevention," then the second search will be more focused.

An Asterisk
Use an asterisk after the root word to include several endings of a keyword.
Instead of doing individual searches for addict, addicted, addicting, and addicts, use addict*

When you get too many results, use the Options to refine your search. 

Scholarly (Peer Reviewed) Check Box

     Academic Search Complete    

   

 

 

SPORTSDiscus

 Academic Search Complete (ASC) & SPORTSDiscusis databases include both scholarly (peer-reviewed) and non-scholarly publications.

To limit your search to scholarly journals, be sure to check the box

Some scholarly search results may include items (book reviews, letters, etc.) that are not scholarly articles.
So, it is important to understand what a scholarly article is!

Using Boolian Search Operators AND, OR, and NOT (ULV)